


and the streets outside your window overflooded

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-11 09:50:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/477237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times john watson’s life was in danger and one time it wasn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the streets outside your window overflooded

**one.** _please god, let me live_

 

His name was Theodore, and something had happened in boot camp that had stuck him with the nickname _Dori_. John can’t think of anyone without a nickname, and he’s sure somewhere someone has written a paper about the psychology of it. Dori drove trucks for United States Marine Corps, carrying mostly foodstuffs, or he had until the improvised explosive device exploded less than ten feet from his truck. It took the humvee in front of him out, and John was the one to pull him out of the cab, bleeding and swearing and crying.

John dragged him around to the other side of the truck, and he could hear the high pitched whine of bullets as they zinged around him, the harsh crack of the tire blowing out. Everything went quiet, the way it did, and John remembers the dust looked golden in the sunlight as it settled. 

“Don’t tell anyone you saw a Marine cry,” Theodore had croaked, and John chuffed in surprised amusement.

“You’re all right,” he’d said, and leaned around to call for a kit when something punched cleanly through the vest he was wearing and set fire to his shoulder. He toppled, and tasted blood.

“Oh my god,” Dori had said, “oh my god, oh my god.” He said it over and over again, and he said it for maybe three minutes.

John had watched him die with blood and desert dust in his mouth, and when he’d closed his eyes he thought he was dead too, and he died with a prayer on his lips.

 

He woke up in a military hospital with a nurse bent over him, and she’d smelled like strawberries, real fresh strawberries, picked right off the vine and eaten in green fields under clear blue skies.

 

“You’re very lucky,” he’d been told, “you’ll make a full recovery, more or less.”

 

 

 **two.** _show me a hero and I will show you a tragedy_

 

John knows people who’ve played with a gun and a single bullet, and they claim it’s the most alive a man could ever feel. John thinks that when he puts a gun against his temple or rests his teeth on the top of the barrel and pulls the trigger there will be no second chances. It’s not how he likes to go about things. John likes certainty, and he likes sticking to his decisions.

He sits on his bed after the dreams, sits on his bed with his gun in his mouth, tasting metal and gunpowder, and the sponge and oil he uses to clean it, and always sighs, rubs the cold barrel down across his cheek and up past his lip to his other cheekbone like a gunpowder Chelsea grin. 

Once he flicks the safety off and pressed it against his temple until he can feel the indent sinking into his skin, and curled his finger around the trigger and went breathless with the risk, the knowledge that a little bit of pressure would redecorate the wall behind him with skin and his blood and his brain. 

He barely makes it to the bin by his desk before he vomits the fry-up he’d eaten for lunch, both hands trembling, his vision shaking, half-hard and feeling more alive than he has since he’d stepped foot back into the United Kingdom.

 

 

 **three.** _I will burn the heart out of you_

 

John always thought he would die from a bomb. He thought it would be a bomb by the road, a mine under his feet, a civilian closing his eyes and praying in the harsh rising and falling of Arabic.

He never thought he'd ever know what those people felt like, a bomb strapped to their chest.

 

 

 **four.** _you can’t go home again_

 

John’s nightmares don’t follow forms or patterns or rules. He’ll have a great day with no running through the streets, no murders or bombings or Chinese acrobatic smuggling assassins, and wake with his fingers reaching for the gun that isn’t there and his shoulder on fire, get up for a glass of water and have his leg give out from beneath him.

He’d slept beautifully the day he shot the cabbie through the chest.

 

The nightmares sneak up on him, and twist around him like his sheets until he staggers into the bathroom and falls into a cold shower, praying Sherlock doesn’t have anything toxic growing in the tub, and seeing dust on the insides of his eyelids and blood under his fingernails. He supposes Sherlock must know, because Sherlock knows everything eventually, but Sherlock never says anything. John also supposes Sherlock doesn’t understand why they continue to plague him--the war was quite some time ago for John, after all.

 

John is napping on the sofa when he wakes up with a jerk, slamming to the ground, completely disoriented. After a long moment he groans, and gets up, his leg aching to the bone, and starts to pick up the pile of books he’d disturbed in his flailing. 

“You were talking,” Sherlock says, and John upsets two more piles by levitating a good six inches into the air and coming back down again on his bad leg.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, heart slamming, and turns. Sherlock is standing in the darkened kitchen, and the light streaming in the windows make his eyes glitter oddly.

“You were talking,” Sherlock says again, slower, thoughtfully, and his head tilts as John straightens his spine, “fascinating.” His hair is roughed up like he’s dragged his fingers through it and a curl falling against the white of his cheek looks almost blue.

“Yeah, it’s riveting,” John snaps, and limps for the stairs. Sherlock can sort out his own bloody piles.

 

John is dreaming about Harry in a brilliantly pink coat, with a pink phone that’s flashing with Moriarty’s number and a band around her ring finger that’s cleaner on the inside. Clara is crying on his shoulder, and her tears soak into his scar until it all blurs together and he’s back, he’s back in the desert with his skin baking under the sun and cracking in the wind, and Dori is bleeding out over his fingers. 

Someone touches him, and John explodes into motion, and he can hear the chatter of automatic weapons and the rasp of Dori’s breath as he dies and he can feel the sting of gravel and he can see the glare of light as the sun glints off metal and the hilt of his knife is beautifully cold and steady in the palm of his hand.

“John,” Sherlock says, and later John will think that he’s one of the few people that managed to put the look of surprise on the Great Sherlock Holmes not once, but twice. He even thinks that Sherlock’s voice had shook a right bit. “Step back, John,” Sherlock says, and John realizes that he’s looking down at the barrel of his own gun.

“John,” Sherlock calls again, and John comes back to himself. Predictably, his leg gives out and his hand shakes so bad he drops the knife. Sherlock catches him around the waist and helps him back to his bed, and it’s only then John realizes he’d backed Sherlock into the opposite wall, his advance stopped only when Sherlock had pulled the gun on him.

“You alright?” Sherlock asks him quietly, and John wonders if that’s become the way they express affection and concern to each other.

“Yeah, God--Sherlock, are you--I’m sorry,” John mumbles, but Sherlock is pushing him under the duvet and the light from the streetlamp outside makes everything look fuzzy and not quite real.

“Go to sleep John,” Sherlock says, and John can feel exhaustion blurring his thoughts.

“Sherlock,” he mumbles again, and falls asleep with the world’s only consulting detective standing by his bedside, holding his service sidearm with a bruise forming on his cheek where John had struck him.

 

When John wakes up in the morning his memory of the event is muted, and when he comes downstairs and is interrupted during his cuppa by Sherlock shouting about a corpse like nothing happened, he thinks it might have been a dream--he rarely can just go back to sleep after such a bad nightmare. It seems like a dream, except his gun was on top of the microwave instead of in his desk drawer, and Sherlock has a fairly impressive bruise on the left side of his face, across his cheekbone stretching up to just under his eye. Sherlock doesn’t seem to want to talk about it--maybe he deleted it, John thinks absently, and when Anderson asks if they’d gotten a little rough in the bedroom they both ignore him.

 

 

 **five.** _i would burn the world down around me for you_

 

John is a doctor, and has always been able to tell exactly what is wrong with himself at any given time. He knows he has a cold two days before strong symptoms show themselves and when he wrenched his knee back in basic training he felt each ligament stretch and scream, his brain supplying him with the name of every muscle and tendon as his mouth spewed expletives, synapses firing sharply in real time. 

John is a soldier, and has always managed to keep calm and cool under extreme pressure. He can stitch up a laceration and slap a battlefield dressing on a wound in record time, and his stitches will be as neat, small, and perfectly shaped as if he’d done it sitting in a clean white room in the green zone. He never hesitates, he never second guesses, and all his decisions are made with the cold clean precision that comes with perfect clarity. He’s lost some of that now, the way he’s lost the defined muscles in his arms and the toned planes of his torso.

But he still knows there is something fundamentally wrong with the way his mind skitters sideways when he tries to focus on the pain that is ripping through his body. _Head injury_ , he decides, and stops thinking too closely about it. In fact, he stops thinking about anything for a while.

 

When he wakes again there is warm stickiness down the back of his neck, and the soothing coolness of concrete against his cheek. John tries to remember what he was doing before all of this, remember how he’s managed to find himself lying on a cold floor with at the very least, a bad concussion. He comes to the conclusion that somehow, it’s all Sherlock’s fault. Then he is glad that he is lying mostly on his side because his stomach rebels and he retches violently, every spasm of his body bringing the harsh burn of bile and acid against his throat and teeth, sparks of agony shooting through his head with every movement until they don’t. 

 

John dreams of basic training, where they practiced how to choke a person into unconsciousness without brain damage, without leaving marks, with clean coarse blue towels. They gave them special patches, thick red crosses to mark them as medical personnel, marking them off limits to the enemy by some treaty made by some people, somewhere that wasn’t an active combat zone. John and the rest of them had taken their knives to them and left them behind in the airplane that deployed them, a plane big enough to fit an entire football pitch inside with plenty of room to spare.

 

Someone yanks on his hair, and his brain screams in agony. His eyes flicker but won’t quite focus, and the face of the man that is talking to him is blurred around the edges and ripples in the middle. He retches again, and bile drips down from his chin and onto the concrete, splattering on the shoes of the man holding him up. He’s dropped, and though his brain says it can’t have been more than two three feet and he gets his hands up to block his face, he feels a single jarring impact as he hits the ground, and then it’s all gone again.

 

“--just a little banged up,” someone is saying, and their voice is grating. John is trying to think of how he got here, and how he’s injured, but his clarity slips through his fingers and makes puddles on the floor, slipping into the cracks of the asphalt. _Sherlock,_ he thinks, because it’s never something _John_ is doing that results in blunt force trauma, and they’re usually together when things go down in such a spectacularly bad way.

 

“--alright?” A familiar voice asks from far away, and whoever is holding him up on his knees gives him a little shake. John’s teeth click together, and his eyes slide in and out focus. There’s smoke on the water, twisting on the chain links of the chainlink fence of the trainyard. 

_Ah,_ John thinks, and remembers. He was going in the front while Sherlock slipped in the back, and he’d come around a cargo container and--something had hit him, he supposes. He doesn’t remember it all, yet, and he knows he may never.

“John, are you alright?” the voice says again, and the phrase triggers a memory—the sharp chemical smell of chlorine sears into John’s nose and up into his brain. His eyes focus.

“Sherlock,” he says clearly, and then lists sideways. The man lets him fall, but this time he doesn’t black out when he hits the ground. _well done me_ he thinks, and frowns. The smoke is twisting in furling wisps ever closer, like a cigarette in rewind.

“Get down,” he mumbles, and coughs harshly, “stop breathing, get your masks on, start breathing, report. Get down, stop breathing, get your mask on, start breathing, report.”

“Shut up John,” Sherlock says. The man kicks at him a little, just enough to make the breath go out of him and for his throat to burn harder.

“What would you do for--”

“Sweat now or bleed later,” John whispers, because he can smell it.

“--burn you down to the earth you stand on--”

“Stop breathing,” John says, because he’s got the right order now, “stop breathing, get down, get your mask on--”

“Shut _up_ , John,” Sherlock says, and John closes his eyes.

 

“--John,” Sherlock is saying, and John opens his eyes to the sky, and gravel under his legs, his back in Sherlock’s lap. _Bugger,_ John thinks, because he can’t see the trains or the fence or the man. _I’ve lost the narrative thread_.

“You’re the doctor,” Sherlock says, “tell me how you’re injured, how to treat you.”

“Sherlock,” John says, and something sighs in relief and curls up and rests in his chest.

“Yes,” Sherlock says, and he doesn’t even sound upset like he usually does when he has to repeat himself for the likes of the stupid humans surrounding him. His eyes are the same grey as the inner-barrel of John’s rifle. _there are many like it, but this one is--_ “--is imperative you--”

“Sherlock,” John slurs, and his brain is saying all kinds of things, firing synapses that are supposed to carry the messages _grade three acceleration-deceleration coup-contrecoup concussion, bruises on ribs one through three, minimum three stitches four inches above the C-1 vertebrae_.

“Sherlock,” his mouth interprets, and his eye flickers in its socket when Sherlock tries to check his pupils, “Sherlock.”

“Stay conscious, John,” Sherlock is saying, “tell me what--”

“Sherlock,” John says, and likes the way his tongue curls around the letters, “Sherlock.” He frowns. _wait a mo_. He’s sure of it now, somehow, someway, this is all Sherlock’s goddamn fault. “Figure it out yourself, asshole,” he tries to say, and passes out again.

 

 

 **reboot.** _the country grand they wrought for, is their monument to-day, and for aye_

 

John throws the cane out after the two weeks of living with Sherlock, and while he has pains and sometimes limps a bit at the clinic when things get slow and monotonous, he hasn’t needed outside support since the night he ran down the streets after Sherlock without quite needing to know why.

It’s why it comes at such a surprise to him when his leg gives out in the kitchen, filling the kettle, and his reactions come much to slow to avoid slamming his head on the sink. 

 

When he wakes up, he’s on the sofa with at least four midgets in his skull wielding sledgehammers, and Sherlock is in the flat. He’s not sure where, exactly, but there’s a humming energy that means he’s somewhere near. There’s a clatter in the kitchen when he groans, and Sherlock swings into his view.

“You alright?” he asks, swiftly assessing him, but it’s not tinged with panic or even real concern. He knows as well as John does that he’ll be fine.

“Yeah, bit embarrassing, that,” John says, and prods his face experimentally, wincing. He’ll have a hell of a bruise, if he doesn’t already. He blinks, because Sherlock is looking a lot more tense than the situation seems to warrant.

“Was it Moriarty,” Sherlock demands, and vibrates in place. John blinks a little, because having Sherlock Holmes’ full attention is a little like sitting in direct Afghani sunlight, blistering and oppressive and unforgettable. “Did he leave me a message?” 

“...yes,” John decides, “and no message,” because that’s a fair bit less embarrassing than _I fell in the early stages of making a cuppa_. As he’s saying it he realizes he ought to know better, because Sherlock’s eyes narrow.

“What happened?” Sherlock asks slowly, and his eyes drift away from John back to the kitchen where he’d presumably found him. John feels like a weight is lifted from his chest when Sherlock removes his gaze, and makes for an escape back to his room.

“John,” Sherlock drawls knowingly, and he’s laughing a little. John feels his lips quirk upwards in response, but doesn’t stop until he’s safely behind his bedroom door, where he chuckles a bit and goes back to bed.

Sherlock will wake him up if anything happens.


End file.
